1 Low Cost Equipment for Laboratories Authors:

Abstract Nowadays, automatic control is a very important subject in engineering education. Normally this subject is very difficult to understand due to the topics it treats. The lecturer also has a lot of difficulties trying to do it easiest in the blackboard. To resolve this problem the student should work with real systems in order to understand all the subject peculiarities. In order to work with real system a very good equipped laboratories are necessary. Normally industrial systems are used and it involves a very high investment that is used in a very low percentage of their possibilities. Industrial equipment is robust and has a lot of features that exceed academic requirements a lot. Moreover if the equipment fails, what is very usual due to students are learning, reparations are also very expensive. This paper presents a solution for this problem. Specific laboratory equipment can be make by students which can be adapted to academic necessities in all points of view. In this case a low cost data acquisition system has been done. It is very easy and cheap to construct and to repair. Its operation is very similar to real industrial equipment. This system involves all the necessary equipment to achieve practical sessions of automatic control in the laboratory with a very low cost. Index Terms data acquisition system, laboratory equipment, low cost, system control